Background
In Downtown East Toronto, approximately 16,500 individuals live with mental health and addiction-related conditions. While DET OHT partners invest $88.7 million annually to provide care, gaps in accessibility still remain.
To address this need, the DET OHT launched a ‘Stepped Care Pilot’, a collaborative initiative involving community members with lived experience, family physicians, mental health navigator, and community mental health providers. The goal of this pilot is to support non-team-based family doctors in connecting their patients experiencing trauma, anxiety, and/or depression with tailored psychotherapy and counseling services.
The team is currently evaluating the number of community pathways established and the number of clients connected with tailored mental health services through this pilot.
How Does the Stepped Care Model Work?
The stepped care model prioritizes the most effective and least resource-intensive treatment as the first step, with a built-in approach to ‘step up’ to more intensive services as needed. This model is designed to support clients experiencing mild to moderate depression and anxiety.
To provide a deeper understanding of this initiative, we prepared a series of conversations with our partners involved in the Stepped Care Pilot.
In Part One, we will explore the barriers to mental health care and the purpose of this pilot. Subsequent features will explore the full process of implementing the stepped care model. It will also discuss its impact on patients’ mental health care experience, family doctors’ commitment to delivering timely and suitable care, and the positive future outlook for mental health care in Ontario.
- Part One: New Stepped Care Pilot Aims to Bridge Gaps in Mental Health Services
- Bridging Gaps in Accessing Mental Health Care